Jigsaw activities usually have students work in groups to develop expertise on a subset of the knowledge and skills, and then form new groups consisting of one expert from the previous groups where each member shares his or her expertise within the group ("jigsaw"). A "1/2 jigsaw" occurs when the expert groups take turns presenting to the whole class . These two strategies are represented in the figures below:
A full jigsaw: Students become experts and then regroup to teach peers in small groups.
A 1/2 jigsaw: Students work in small groups to build expertise and then take turns teaching entire class.
What are Jigsaw's theoretical foundations?
What supports are necessary for jigsaw activities to work in your classroom?
After exploring assessment using a jigsaw activity, students were asked whether they thought that jigsaw activities could lead to real learning. In a blind vote, 12 said thumb's up, 4 gave jigsaw a thumb's down.
Strengths of Jigsaw
Weaknesses of Jigsaw
Teacher actions
to address weaknesses
Provides Opportunity for Students to teach
Ss don't care
Raise stakes (quiz, subsequent performance, etc)
Venue for student interaction
takes up (wastes) time
Model importance of process
Ss remember what they teach
Ss might only remember what they taught
Provide a notesheet to scaffold Ss capturing knowledge in each group.
Accountability
T can't ensure accuracy of secondary teaching
T can circulate, assess each group's take-away points.
Experiences in first group builds experts
No product for quick assessment.
Require Ss to complete a product.
Everyone becomes an expert
Hard for Ss to critically listen to each other.
Model acceptable behaviors, e.g. questioning, notetaking, etc, before activity.
reinforces idea that every individual can make a contribution
Everyone gets chance for success
How Can Wikis Be Used During Jigsaws?
Providing Basic Structure
Supporting Community Knowledge Building
The jigsaw activity structure was originally used as a way to support building a "community of learners" within a classroom. Communities can be formed around authentic collaboration and practice, so jigsaw activities can be made more authentic if the knowledge and skills clarified and organized by the "expert" groups is in turn combined online into a persistent coherent whole.
One way to do this in the context of a wiki is to have each expert group responsible for following a link from a page introducing the overall problem or goal to represent their knowledge on their own group page. When the group is satisfied with their page, they can use it for a shared reference as they disperse into heterogeneous groups for teaching.
Teaching Notes:
If desired, the teacher can pre-make the expert group pages and include scaffolds that can guide the group's efforts around the new material.
This process eliminates the barrier to synchronous collaboration common to wikis: Pages are not meant to be edited by more than one user simultaneously.
This approach can stretch a jigsaw across classes, i.e. if there are four groups in each class, then each group can be assigned to add to each page, or contribute to another jigsaw task.
Knowledge can be built across time. Instead of doing the activity from scratch each year, students in following years can be charged with refining, reorganizing, or extending the existing work. Each year's contribution can be written in a different color.
After the jigsaw activity is completed, the students or the teacher can combine the groups' individual pages into a single page. This page is a concatenation of the individual groups' pages. In wikispaces, this is easily done using the "Wikispace" options in the "Embed Wiget" Tool. This single page can be presented to the class as community knowledge and an authentic product of their efforts. This process is represented in the figure below:
What is a "Jigsaw" activity?
Jigsaw activities usually have students work in groups to develop expertise on a subset of the knowledge and skills, and then form new groups consisting of one expert from the previous groups where each member shares his or her expertise within the group ("jigsaw"). A "1/2 jigsaw" occurs when the expert groups take turns presenting to the whole class . These two strategies are represented in the figures below:
A 1/2 jigsaw: Students work in small groups to build expertise and then take turns teaching entire class.
What are Jigsaw's theoretical foundations?
What supports are necessary for jigsaw activities to work in your classroom?
After exploring assessment using a jigsaw activity, students were asked whether they thought that jigsaw activities could lead to real learning. In a blind vote, 12 said thumb's up, 4 gave jigsaw a thumb's down.
to address weaknesses
How Can Wikis Be Used During Jigsaws?
Providing Basic Structure
Supporting Community Knowledge Building
The jigsaw activity structure was originally used as a way to support building a "community of learners" within a classroom. Communities can be formed around authentic collaboration and practice, so jigsaw activities can be made more authentic if the knowledge and skills clarified and organized by the "expert" groups is in turn combined online into a persistent coherent whole.One way to do this in the context of a wiki is to have each expert group responsible for following a link from a page introducing the overall problem or goal to represent their knowledge on their own group page. When the group is satisfied with their page, they can use it for a shared reference as they disperse into heterogeneous groups for teaching.
Teaching Notes:
After the jigsaw activity is completed, the students or the teacher can combine the groups' individual pages into a single page. This page is a concatenation of the individual groups' pages. In wikispaces, this is easily done using the "Wikispace" options in the "Embed Wiget" Tool. This single page can be presented to the class as community knowledge and an authentic product of their efforts. This process is represented in the figure below:
Example Assignments